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THE BASICS
In 2185, Contact with an alien race is first made. The aliens contact
not the U.S. government, nor the government of the other world power, Japan,
but the government of Canada. The U.S. has a huge ego problem with this.
Japan gets over it. It turns out that the new race thinks that nations
other than Canada, Australia, and certain South American and African nations
are not worth their time, because they haven’t been responsible. That is
to say, they’ve done such a lousy job taking care of their natural resources
and native ecology, that the new race of aliens doesn’t think they’re intelligent
enough to bother talking to. Needless to say, the big powers are rather
miffed by this, and eventually take action to make themselves feel important
again.
THE GOVERNMENT
The United States government still has not changed. Several additional
amendments have been added to the Constitution, primarily all to the effect
that any sort of discrimination based on various physical attributes or
personal choices is illegal. The nation has not had a president who was
in any way well respected since Al Gore’s third term (2012-2015) and Congress
has become so large with the addition of the states of Puerto Rico, North
Mexico, South Mexico, and Panama, that very little legislation ever gets
passed. The legislative branch of the government, as such, has become rather
ineffectual, and the number of citizens who care enough to vote has dwindled
to approximately 2% of the population. The judicial branch has become important
however, and the appointment of a new Supreme Court Judge is one of the
most followed events in the media. Decisions as to interpretation of century-old
laws are what truly create law in the United States of the late twenty-second
century.
THE ECONOMY
The economy of the United States, on the other hand, is flourishing.
In a bi-polar economic world where the nation’s only real competitor is
the Japanese Empire, the United States has an extremely strong economy.
With an extremely high level of technology, the average citizen works twenty
hours a week and has a higher standard of living than most upper-middle
class citizens of the 1990’s. The rest of their time is taken up with various
technological games and past-times, from interactive television to total
immersion video games. Other nations, meanwhile, are struggling to keep
up economically. Only a few third-world nations currently engaged in civil
war have a starving populace, but even the nation of Europe (France, England,
Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Italy and Denmark finally formed
one united nation in 2114) has to struggle to keep U.S. and Japanese imports
from putting their people out of work.
INTERNATIONAL SITUATION
This is the sticker. Due to the alien race’s choice to not interact
with any nations which have not taken what they consider to be adequate
care of their environment, many of the world’s nations feel insulted. In
some cases, such as Switzerland and other independent nations on the Eurasian
continent, the countries have reacted by focusing their energies on environmental
restoration programs. In other cases, such as the nations of Europe, Russia
and the United States, the nations have chosen to take the opposite route,
and simply ignore the existence of those aliens. Meanwhile, Canada itself
has had to close its borders to prevent overpopulation. Millions of people
from all over the world flock to Canada to catch a glimpse of the aliens,
while millions more head for Australia. The smaller nations such as Congo
and Chile too, have had to close their borders to prevent a flooding of
immigrants to their small, third world countries. Canada is the main focus
of these alien addicts, as it is the home of the majority of the aliens
as well as their home base and capital for their separate government. Scientists,
artists and philosophers have suddenly become valuable commodities, and
many of these elite have defected to Canada or Australia.
RELIGION
While the far East has remained much the same in their religious beliefs,
the western world has taken the relaxed judeo-christian religion to a point
where it is more a philosophy or belief than any system of values or morals;
a christian is just a person who happens to believe that Jesus existed;
being the same religion as another person in the West no longer means you
have any of the same opinions or values. Churches, as such, have become
locations for social activity; Sunday mornings no longer have preachers
speaking about religion but rather are meetings for social clubs in a manner
such as the YMCA.
TECHNOLOGY
Technology in the United States has gotten to a point where it really
does give people less of a workload. A typical home computer has a 24”
screen, about 64 gigabytes of RAM, and a simple basic artificial intelligence
which uses voice and gesture commands for input. Keyboards are a key for
the deaf, replaced by voice commands, and the mouse has lost it’s use because
it is simpler for one to merely use his or her finger to point. A computer
game console is a common sight in almost everyone’s homes; the console
is a small room about bathroom sized which uses various technologies to
put out a complete virtual environment which is interactive through the
web with all other consoles so that total-immersion video games provide
a practically infinite selection of multi-player games. Travel is practically
instantaneous; there is an international network of bullet-trains which
travel at supersonic speeds across every continent; aircraft, used primarily
for crossing the seas, travel at speeds so rapid that one can travel from
Canada to Australia in less than two hours. Technology is the way of life
for most people; even in backwards third-world countries everyone has some
sort of home computer system, assuming that they have a home to put one
in. Personal transport like cars is practically non-existent except in
the back country; with the massive population problem, parking is simply
not reasonable, and train stops and moving walkways have replaced parking
lots and streets in almost every city in the nation. The cars that are
still around use distilled water for fuel; primarily these cars consist
of off-road vehicles similar to a jeep. In the U.S., the primary use for
these vehicles is rental to tourists exploring the national parks like
Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. In Canada, these vehicles are much more
common, one of the reasons most of the world sees Canada as a backwards
behind-the-times nation. All the more reason for the general dislike for
the aliens when they landed.
STORY FOCUS:
The story begins about ten years later, after all the politics
have been worked out and things have settled down again back to some approximation
of normality. Canada has a joint government with the new race, which they
call the Klynn. The Klynn look almost human, but are taller than most humans,
and have a more delicate bone structure. Their skin has a slight blue tint
to it that is only truly noticeable in bright lighting conditions. The
Klynn have not had any sort of relations with the less ecologic-minded
nations, but operate through the Canadian and Australian governments for
all international relations. As such, they know very little about the other
nations. One of the Klynn, a young male who moved to the Canada colony
from his home planet only two or three years ago, decides that he is intrigued
by the stories he hears of the other nations, and undertakes a personal
mission to go into the United States and explore it for himself. This is
his story.